Sometimes, the greatest journeys occur when we stand still. This is an important lesson from one of nature’s miracle workers ~ the tree. Trees have been around for about 400 million years. In contrast, humans have only existed for about 100 million years. Today, as the world comes to a standstill, trees offer us amazing journeys, of insight, listening and memory. In heeding trees, we enrich ourselves immeasurably. Problems that today’s world faces originate from our growing dissociation from ~ and disregard for ~ nature.

The cardinal error of our modern, industrial way of life is the way in which we continue to treat irreplaceable natural capital as income. In the words of E.F. Schumacher, “Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature, but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.” Aristotle’s dogma that plants have souls but no sensation lasted through the Middle Ages and into the eighteenth century, when Carl von Linne, grandfather of modern botany, declared that plants differ from animals and human only in their lack of movement.

But the great 19th century English naturalist and biologist Charles Darwin proved that every tendril of plant has its power of independent movement and noted that plants “acquire and display this power only when it is of some advantage to them.” A tree indeed is a life form. When one plucks a leaf from a tree, living cells around the area undergo violent disturbances. Scientist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose invented a device called a crescograph, an incredibly sensitive instrument capable of magnifying plant movement up to 10,000 times, and with the help of this sensitive instrument a plant’s reactions to exposure to external stimulus were made visible.

Right thinking is the product of understanding, and understanding is constantly undergoing modification and change. Generally, we never look at a tree, or if we do it is with a view to using that tree, either to sit in its shade, or to cut it down for lumber. In other words, we look at trees with a utilitarian purpose; we never look at a tree without projecting........

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